Who owns the Holocaust?…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

Who owns the Holocaust? That, ultimately, is the key question posed by the impending legislation in Poland that will criminalise any discussion, or investigation, or mere mention, of incidents of Polish collusion with the Nazi occupiers during World War Two. Read more

Israel cannot deny the reality that BDS is in decline

Recently, I’ve been nursing some concerns about the way the Israeli government is handling its response to the BDS campaign against the Jewish state, and with it the wider challenges of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the Western world…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Win or lose, Iranians want regime change

For the first time in nearly a decade, one dares to believe that the Islamist clerics who have ruled Iran since 1979 will not be in power by the time the 40th anniversary of their revolution rolls around in 2019…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

In decades-long AMIA Jewish center affair, the truth will come out

Like so many pins in a bowling alley, the treacherous former Argentine leaders who signed a secret pact exonerating Iran of its responsibility for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires are, finally, collapsing under the rolling weight of judicial scrutiny…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

The ultimate victory of an African tyrant

Which single individual made the following statements?…asks Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Hopes betrayed: the Russian Revolution and the Jews

Another week, another centennial. Following the Balfour Declaration’s milestone, it’s now time to look back on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, where a communist insurrection in St. Petersburg, then known as Petrograd, gave birth to a state that caused untold misery to millions for almost the remainder of the 20th century…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Year zero: the Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration

For the Palestinians, the year zero is not 1948, when the state of Israel came into being, but 1917, when Great Britain issued, in the November of that year, the Balfour Declaration—expressing support for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Harvey Weinstein’s disgrace produces another nasty caricature

Walking through central London last week, and with a spare half hour on my hands, I decided to pay a quick visit to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Inside, I spent most of my time intently studying a painting that I could not recall having seen before: “The Philosopher,” a 1645 canvas by the Italian painter Salvator Rosa…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

In AMIA Jewish centre episode, Hector Timerman’s guilt is unveiled

It has been 23 years since the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires was devastated by a Hezbollah truck bomb, claiming the lives of 85 people and wounding hundreds more…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.0rg. Read more

Kushner’s initiative doesn’t change Palestinian reality

After several visits to Israeli leaders in Jerusalem and Palestinian leaders in Ramallah, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s attempt to restart the peace process has hit all the predictable obstacles…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Leave the symbols of Nazi persecution alone, Billy Joel

Billy Joel’s decision to sport a yellow star on the front and back of his jacket during a concert this week was a nod to history that the singer may not have been aware of…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Let’s talk about sex: the aftermath of Charlottesville

The scene is Paris in the late 19th century. At a glittering ball, a handful of eligible gentilhommes eagerly circled the charming Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld—something of an Ivanka Trump in her day—in the hope of being granted a dance…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Welcome to the Shi’a corridor…writes Ben Cohen

If you haven’t encountered the term “Shi’a corridor” yet, chances are that you will in the coming weeks, particularly if the ongoing confrontation between the U.S. and Iran in Syria intensifies. Read more

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t win, so British Jews shouldn’t give up on Labour

For me, the main takeaway from the British election June 8 was that Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the opposition Labour party, didn’t win it…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

From Greeley, Colorado to Manchester, U.K.

For those—like me—who’d never really given any thought to singer Ariana Grande before the terrorist atrocity at her concert in the British city of Manchester, it took a few minutes to figure out the correspondence between her audience and the target selection of suicide bomber Salman Abedi…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Trump crisis shouldn’t mask new opportunities for Middle East peace

By any standards, it was an extraordinary week for U.S.-Israel relations—and that was before President Donald Trump even arrived in Israel for his official visit…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

The drumbeat against Jewish ritual in Europe sounds once more…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

This past week, Jewish ritual observance has come under attack in both Belgium and Norway. While there is nothing suggesting the respective moves against shechita (kosher slaughter) in Belgium and brit milah (Jewish circumcision) in Norway were coordinated, both speak to an ingrained tendency in Europe that dismisses these core requirements for Jews as no more and no less than cruelty of a particularly Jewish sort. Read more

Ken Livingstone: enabler of evil…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

I’ve written many times about the antisemitism that continues to plague the British Labour Party—once a noble party of both opposition and government that has now, under its current far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, become a laughably ineffective opposition with little hope of attaining government leadership.  Read more

Approach Marine Le Pen with caution…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

There was an illuminating report from Paris in The Wall Street Journal this week that related how Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, has been consulting a group of French bankers and captains of industry in a bid to continue the main-streaming of her party as the country’s presidential election approaches. Read more

A UN task for President Trump…Ben Cohen/JNS.org

For those of us who spent much of 2016, based upon then-candidate Donald Trump’s own bombastic declarations, worrying about the thrust of the foreign policy of a future Trump administration, President Trump’s address to Congress Feb. 28 provided welcome relief. Read more

On antisemitism, difficult questions and contested answers

In his magnum opus “A Lethal Obsession,” the late Robert Wistrich, one of Israel’s finest scholars of the murderous pathways of Jew-hatred, elegantly summarised the character of antisemitism at the turn of this century…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Trump-Netanyahu meeting shatters ‘Palestine First’ regional peacemaking strategy

The morning after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first official meeting with President Donald Trump, multiple headlines proclaimed Feb. 16 that the two-state solution—whereby an independent, sovereign Palestinian state would be created alongside the state of Israel within agreed and final borders—was, if not quite dead, fast approaching death’s door…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

What Maimonides teaches us about Trump…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

If anyone can be said to have discovered the formula for a world without evil, that accolade belongs to the great medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. “For through cognition of the truth,” Maimonides wrote, “enmity and hatred are removed and the inflicting of harm by people on one another is abolished.” Read more

At last, a real threat

I will admit that this sounds perverse, but Iran’s recent ballistic missile test was welcome in one important sense. Let me explain…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

The promise of Ahmed Hussen

He came to Canada as a 16-year-old refugee from Somalia. He’s highly regarded across the Canadian political spectrum. He was just appointed as immigration minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

Confronting the politicisation of the Holocaust…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

About a month ago, I wrote in this column about a group of British animal rights activists who employed Nazi imagery in a vicious campaign against a kosher abattoir (slaughterhouse) in London. This, I said, was another example of the Holocaust being used as a stick with which to beat the Jews, by turning their own victimhood on its head. Read more

The tide slowly turns against Iranian terror

A glimmer of hope in the fight against Iranian-backed terrorism shone forth from Argentina during the final days of 2016…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

You can’t make peace with bad leaders

On one of my first assignments abroad as a rookie journalist back in the early 1990s, I found myself in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, just as the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia was getting underway in earnest…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org. Read more

The illiberal world of Stephen Bannon

In considering the furore around President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Stephen Bannon, the CEO of the hard-right news website Breitbart, as his chief strategist, let’s start with the perspective of those who have defended him…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org.
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The decisions facing Donald Trump…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

Donald Trump is now America’s master. Read more

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